Fates Much Worse
by Darkenning
Summary: "It is so funny that you of all people should not realize what a liar I am." Dying is easy; despair isn't nearly as cheap a date. Lemons in later chapters.
1. Chapter 1

Danganronpa _is the property of Spike Chunsoft, not me. This is parody, protected speech_.

**Fates Much Worse  
>Part One<strong>

She crouched on the bathroom floor, clutching her broken wrist and trying very hard not to descend into a blind panic. Since it was fair to say that she'd been on the verge of one ever since she'd watched the video showing her what had happened to her friends, restraining herself wasn't easy. But she had hope. She still had hope.

Chiefly, at the moment, what she was hoping was that the dumbass on the other side of the stuck bathroom door would get bored with trying to break it down with his dumbass muscles and just go back to his room with dumbass plans to complain about her the next day. By then, she was sure, she'd have a good explanation for what she'd failed to do. No, not failed, only pretended to do. Pretended. That was much better. She'd just been pretending to make an attempt to kill the dumbass, so that ... so that ... okay, the counterfactual scenario was going to take some work, which she'd be able to do just as soon as the dumbass stopped banging on the door, already!

But she knew that it was going to be okay, because even if the dumbass did manage to get the door down, she still had the knife. Which she could use in her other hand. Even if she wasn't left-handed. So it was okay, she was going to get out of this just fine and then she was going to get out of the school and go out and be even more famous than she'd been before because that was her destiny dammit her destiny and nobody not the dumbass and not a psychopathic bear-thingy was going to get in the way of her destiny and -

The stuck door came unstuck.

"Okay," the dumbass said as he pushed his way through. "Let's just calm down and talk about this!"

He was going to kill her. He was going to try and kill her just because she'd been pretending to try and kill him. Really it was good that things were like that because if he was going to try and kill her then she had every right nay even a DUTY to kill him right back! "Stay away from me!" she shrieked as she charged towards him, waving the knife awkwardly. Surely this would make him run away!

Why wasn't the dumbass running away?!

"Hey, stop that!" he yelled as he grabbed hold of her left wrist and also her right, sending searing pain shrieking up her right arm. She twisted in his grip, cutting him slightly again, and then he pushed her arms back -

And there was a sudden explosion of much colder pain in her chest. Nearly frozen, she managed to look down to see the knife there, most of the blade buried just under her breastbone, blood flowing from the wound. For what felt like a lot longer than a second, she stood there, staring at it ... then lost her footing and fell back against the wall.

"What the fuck did you just make me do?" the dumbass shrieked, sounding as terrified as she should be.

But she wasn't scared. Really, that made the whole thing all right. For the first time in forever, she wasn't afraid anymore. The worst had happened, and now ... now nothing mattered anymore.

Almost nothing. She managed to lift a hand, reached for the knife and felt the blood covering her fingers. There. That should do it. Now to get her hand behind her back so the dumbass, who was still blaming her for all this as he stomped around in the bedroom, freaking out instead of doing the sensible thing and trying to help her, wouldn't be able to see what she'd done. And though it was awkward and she couldn't tell if she'd succeeded, she had a hunch that it was going to work out. They'd figure it out. Some of them would figure it out.

She was never going to graduate.

But maybe one of them would.

Maybe _he_ would -

Oh. Yeah. He was going to be upset about this, wasn't he ...

Oh well.

And then there was nothing but inky blackness.

* * *

><p>And then Maizono Sayaka woke up. She drew in a deep breath, wondering at the lingering pain in her chest, since everything that had happened had surely just been a horrible horrible dream that she wanted only to forget ...<p>

But then why couldn't she see anything? Her eyes were open, after all ... but everything was the same whether she opened or closed them. She lifted up her hands - hand, rather, since one of her arms wasn't responding to her thoughts - and found that something was surrounding her, something ... plastic-like. What? What was going on here? Why was she in some kind of a bag? Where was she? What -

Then another sound intruded. A zipper noise, brief, faint, but immediately catching her attention because as it came to her, there was another sensory impression that accompanied it. Light! Light coming through a tiny white hole in the darkness, just above her head. Naturally, she reached for it.

More zipper noise, as her hand contacted metal. She pushed down instinctively, and the tiny white hole expanded, and she lifted her head up out of it ...

And looked blearily down at the black rubber bag her head was protruding out of.

She'd seen these kind of bags before, on television. She knew what they were called.

That was when she started screaming.

Fortunately, her complete loss of composure was relatively short-lived. While she lay there and screamed her head off, the impotent thrashing motions of her panic shifted her weight enough to send herself tumbling off of whatever tabletop or other surface she was resting on. She dropped helplessly to the floor below - only about a meter or so - and the shock of actual physical pain, particularly intense on her right arm, was enough to shock her out of the hysteria. Of course, that meant that she had to deal with the pain.

After a moment, when the pain had eased enough to let her move again, she reached up with her good hand and pushed down the zipper of the ... the _bag_. (Her internal narrative jerked away from the more elaborate term.) That allowed her to get a good look at her current condition for the first time. She was wearing what looked a bit like the gown that she'd worn the last time she'd been admitted to a hospital - not a pleasant set of memories - and her right arm was heavily bandaged and wrapped up in a sling against her chest.

That meant that her wrist really had been broken. Swallowing, she lifted up her left arm to touch the area where the knife had gone in. She could detect what felt like bandages under the smock, and flinched a bit at the pain that her own touch caused her. But she'd thought ... no, she'd been sure that it was a fatal injury. On the other hand, what did she really know about such things? It wasn't like she'd ever been killed before.

Slowly, awkwardly, she got to her feet and took a look around. The room, like every room in the school, had no windows. (Was she still in the school? Maybe she shouldn't assume.) It didn't have much of anything, except for a door, a set of cold fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and the table - on rollers, she'd noticed - from which she'd just fallen. Wait, now that she took a look, there was something else. The head of the table - at least she thought it was the head, since she _thought_ that her own head had been looking out at the world from that direction when she poked her head out of the bag - was near a panel in the wall that looked like a miniature garage door.

It had a handle. Hesitantly, she reached out with her good hand for that handle.

Before she touched it, however, there was a buzzing noise that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Simultaneously, the table rolled on its own power so that it bumped into the wall just below the panel. A second buzz, and then the panel slid open very quickly. Then, with a whoosh, a black rubber bag shot out of the panel and landed on the table. At that sight, she jerked back, and so when the panel closed just as quickly as it opened, she wasn't in any position to try and hold it open, even if she'd wanted to do so.

Not that such considerations were much on her mind at the moment. Her attention was riveted on the bag. And this time, she had less difficulty giving the bag its proper name - the body bag. It was clearly just as occupied as the one she'd just escaped had been, but she couldn't even begin to guess at the condition of that occupant. Every bit as hesitantly as before, she reached out for the bag's zipper.

Once again, events outpaced her attempts to interact with them. The zipper started to wiggle slightly, and then slid down just a few notches, enough that a pair of red-nailed fingers could poke out of the tiny opening, and push down on it. Once the hole was large enough for a head to push through, the fingers dropped out of sight, and a strawberry-blonde set of hair began to slowly push itself out of the hole. Somewhat dazedly, Maizono found herself remembering and comparing the present situation to the sight of a baby's head 'crowning' as had been featured in a sex ed video she'd watched, years before.

And then the face of the other girl exposed itself. She looked blearily about. "Wow," said Enoshima Junko. "That really sucked."

Sayaka swallowed, then hoarsely spoke up. "Enoshima-san?"

The other girl's icy blue eyes, which had been looking blearily around the room, abruptly settled on her with their usual disconcerting laser-like focus. "Uh," she said. "Maizono. I'd say this was a surprise except that it's not really except for the parts that are, y'know?"

"No," Sayaka answered. "Did, did he get you too? Did you walk in on him while he was cleaning up and -"

"Cleaning - oh, you're talking about the guy who iced you," the model said. "Nah. I mouthed off to our esteemed headmaster and so he made an example out of me. And then, well ..."

Sayaka felt the panic swelling up again. "We're dead? This ... this is what happens after we die?" She looked around at the sterile room. "What kind of sick afterlife -"

"It's not like that," Enoshima interrupted, her affected dialect momentarily in abeyance. "This isn't the afterlife. We didn't die. It's a lot more complicated than that."

"What do you mean, Enoshima-san?" Sayaka asked in an unhappy tone that nonetheless wasn't a whine, because she wasn't a whiner.

"Oh quit whining," the other said disgustedly. Then she closed her eyes. "And ... while you're at it, you might as well stop calling me that. My name isn't Enoshima Junko. It's Mukuro. Ikusaba Mukuro."

"Huh?" Sayaka inquired calmly and without any confusion.

'Enoshima' shook her head. "It's ... tell you what, I'll explain everything if you help me out of this thing."

Hesitantly, Sayaka reached forward and pulled the body bag's zipper the rest of the way down, exposing the other girl's torso - which was covered with a gown just like the one she was wearing. But her upper arms were heavily bandaged, and from the looks of things the bandages extended onto her torso as well. Whatever had happened to her was clearly a lot more traumatic, at least in a physical sense, than Sayaka's injuries had been.

The girl - whom she supposed that she should get into the habit of thinking of as Ikusaba, now - looked down at herself and let out an annoyed sigh. "There goes my perfect record," she mumbled.

"Huh?" Sayaka repeated.

"Nothing, nothing, never mind, not important. Okay, it's kind of a long story, but the short version is, I'm Junko's twin sister -"

"But you said your name -"

"What did I _just_ say about it being a long story? Look, for reasons that I don't want to go into right now, I was posing as my sister on our first day of school and got caught up in all of this. And then ... well, the mastermind found out about it, and recruited me to work as a secret agent inside your group. If I didn't do what I was told, something horrible would happen to my little sister ... and nothing else in the world matters to me as much as she does."

"The mastermind?" Sayaka asked, blinking.

"The person who's running Monobear. Come on, he's obviously a robot, you had to have figured that part out, right?"

Sayaka, who of course had, blinked. "Then ... you know who's behind all of this?" she asked.

Ikusaba let out a long sigh. "No," she lied. "I only met the mastermind, I don't know their name and I didn't recognize that person's face. I don't know what all this is about ... but I do know what's happening now. In between Monobear killing me and waking up here, I woke up somewhere else and had it all explained to me."

It had been a very unusual conversation.

* * *

><p>When Mukuro had woken up, she had been in more pain than she could ever remember having endured. The sheer torment was almost enough to drive her back into unconsciousness, but she knew that it was important to stay awake. Very, very important.<p>

Because _she_ was there, looking down at her expressionlessly with a face that was almost a mirror of her own. _Almost_. Mukuro had nearly panicked when the slight difference had been pointed out, earlier. There was a strong urge to ask her if that was the reason for all of this, but she quelled it. There was something much more important to say. Much, much more important.

"... I'm ... sorry ..." she said.

Junko simply nodded. "It's all right," she said, soothingly. And that, more than anything else, told Mukuro that awful things, far worse than having spears explode into your chest, were in the offing. "It's all just part of the plan. Oh, not the plan I told you about, that was complete bullshit that I came up with to get you to act the right way. I'm talking about the real plan." Abruptly there was a crown on her head. "Are you not entertained by my godlike brilliance?" she asked haughtily.

"Uh-huh," Mukuro replied. She didn't like the queen act. She hadn't liked the person it was based on very much, and thought that her sister would have done better to imitate the one of their circle of acquaintances who actually was royalty. But that wasn't the sort of thing you could really tell someone like Junko. "Can ... I ask ... something?"

"Why certainly, Muku-chan!" Junko enthused cutely.

This was a more tolerable mask. Slightly. "How'm I ... alive?"

From the look on her sister's face, she'd known that was a mistake. "Dumb, dumb, dumb big sister!" she spewed out cutely. "Don't you know? Don't you know? We are Ultimate Despair! We have tons and tons and tons of really, really smaaaaaart Ultimate Mad Scientists and Ultimate Unethical Doctors and Ultimate You Get The Ideas working for us! With allllll of thaaaat, it's easy-peasy." Glasses appeared on her face. "The design of a method to induce a state similar to death, slowing down all biological functions to the point where only the most intrusive examination could determine the subject's actual state, occurred almost simultaneously with the discovery of a method of inducing rapid regrowth of injured tissue," she explained clinically.

"Oh," Mukuro said. That did make sense. As much as anything that had ever happened to either of them did. "Then -"

"I used it at half-strength before we started this little chat," Real-Junko explained. "That's why you're in pain. This is your punishment for screwing up."

"... thank you."

"You're welcome. And now, we come to the actual plan."

"You said ... they were going to die ... you said ..."

"Mukuro-chan. Dear, sweet Mukuro-chan. My best-beloved and utterly useless big sister. It is so funny that you of all people should not realize _what a liar I am_." And now she grinned. "We're going to do much worse things to them than that. Are you ready to play your new role in all of this?"

There was really only one answer she could give to that question from her little sister, who was the most important person in the world to her, whom she did not want to see suffer the horrible fate of becoming so bored with the world that her anger turned inward again. There was really only one anwer that she could give.

So she gave it.

* * *

><p>"Wait," said Sayaka. "Waitwaitwaitwait. How's that again?"<p>

Ikusaba paused in her necessarily abbreviated account of that meeting, which omitted any details that might give Sayaka a clue as to the mastermind's true identity. "Which part?"

"The, the part about how we, we slow down, and ... how does that ... it doesn't make any sense," she concluded. "I don't remember being injected with anything -"

"Do you remember anything that happened between your arrival at the school and when you woke up in the classroom?" Ikusaba asked patiently. "No? Of course not. It was probably then, that we were all injected with something that would release that drug if we ever suffered an injury bad enough to kill us."

"But ... but, no, that doesn't make any sense," the idol protested. "We're being manipulated into trying to kill each other, but when we do, the people we kill don't actually die? Why would anyone do that? It doesn't make sense."

"Well," said Ikusaba cheerfully. "It's a good thing, then, then it doesn't have to make sense. Isn't it? So then you don't have to make any sense out of it. You just have to figure out how you're going to survive it. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. You've shown that you can do that by trying to kill all of us." That part was delivered cheerfully too.

Sayaka rocked back. "I ... I never did, I just ... I was _pretending_ and -"

"Lie to yourself all you like. I'm not interested in your justifications, right now. We need to find out what the rest of the situation is. Presumably, we're not going to just be stuck in this room forever, or there wouldn't be a door. Does it open?"

Still stunned a bit by that last wholly unfair accusation, all that Sayaka could do was to repeat, "Open?"

"Yes, that thing that doors generally do unless they happen to be locked. Or stuck. You may have observed it happening in the recent past."

Sayaka tried to stammer out a reply, but Ikusaba was already in motion, walking over to the door and turning the handle. "Oh, look, it does open!" she said. "Are you coming or would you rather wait here?"

Following along behind the far more aggressive girl, Sayaka soon found that the door led to another hallway - a long one, almost exactly as long as the hallway where their rooms were located back in the main body of the school. It was like that hallway in more than just length, though, for there were other doors all along both sides of it at even intervals, with name plates just beside them. At the very far end, the nameplates for the doors had pictures of the two of them on it, just like their rooms back there had - well, almost like them. Those pictures hadn't had their eyes exxed out.

Just beyond that point, the hallway opened up into a large room filled with couches, chairs and tables, and with a large viewscreen on one wall. As they arrived in that room, pausing to take it in, the viewscreen flared to life, and they were treated to the sight of the people they'd left behind standing in a circle in a room somewhere.

"What -" said Sayaka.

And then what was going on became very clear, as Monobear on the screen proclaimed, "Let's start off with a simple explanation of our school trial!"

**To Be Continued.**

_Author's Note_

_This is intended as the reverse of Teakay's "Hope is No More Behind A Closed Door." Look it up if you're curious.  
><em>


	2. Chapter 2

**Fates Much Worse**  
><strong>Chapter Two<strong>

For the most part, they'd watched the trial in silence, not really believing what they were witnessing. But now it was over, and the verdict had been delivered, and, with terrible swiftness, the sentence had been carried out. And now one of them was finally moved to speak, as the image of the battered, nearly unrecognizable form of Kuwata Leon stayed frozen on the screen.

"YES!" Sayaka exulted, fists clenched as she sat in front of the TV and face twisted in a look of unspeakable joy. "Oh, yes, yes, _yes!_ Did it hurt? I bet it hurt, didn't it, you lousy sack of shit! I _hope_ it hurt! I hope it hurt a thousand, no, ten thousand times worse than what you did to me, you fucking son of a bitch! Fuck you fuck you fuck you! You killed me, you fuck! You fucking deserve to fucking die for fucking killing me!"

The exultation was only brief, though, as her excitement clearly aggravated the lingering effects of the weird medical treatment which had saved her life, and she flinched in pain, turning away from the TV in the process to see that Enoshima - no, no, Ikusaba, had to remember that - was staring at her expressionlessly.

"What?" Sayaka snapped.

"Um ... I feel kind of obligated to point out that he did not, in fact, kill you or anything," the model reminded her.

"So what? He still tried to kill me! He thought he was killing me! It's the exact same thing!"

"Is it the same thing as you trying to kill him?" Ikusaba asked, eyebrow raised.

"What? No, of course not, that's completely different! I was just pretending!"

"Sticking with that, huh?"

"It's the truth."

"Whatever," she said, turning back to the TV, which had gone dark in the interim. "Looks like it's over. I wonder if this was a recording or a live broadcast?"

"Who - no, that's actually a good question," Sayaka amended, manic grin starting to come back. "If it was a recording, and we ask really really nicely, whoever's behind this will show it to us again and again and -"

"Uh, that's cool, but what I was wondering was whether there's been enough time since that happened for it to happen again."

Sayaka's grin vanished. "'It'?" she repeated.

"'It'," Ikusaba repeated right back, pointing towards the hallway which led to the dorm rooms and ultimately the 'autopsy room' from which they'd both emerged a short while ago.

Sayaka followed her pointing finger, frowning in confusion.

And then, quite suddenly, she saw what the other girl was talking about. "Oh fuck," she said. "Oh fuck fuck fuck fuck. He's going to be showing up there, isn't he?" She quickly stood up. "I've got to, I've got to - I can't let him do it to me again!" And with that, she dashed towards the doorway.

More slowly, for she was in a bit more pain than the other girl, Ikusaba got to her own feet and followed her, pausing just inside the hallway to note that only two faces were lit up on the nameplates of the doors in the dormitory. Then she headed down the hallway.

In the autopsy room, Sayaka was frantically and somewhat awkwardly pulling open drawers, all of which proved to be empty. "Knives!" she shouted. "What the hell kind of autopsy room doesn't have knives for the medical examiner! This is a lousy autopsy room! Ah!" On impulse, she yanked one of the drawers right out of the counter, since it was only a slider rather than being fixed in there. Then she managed to lift it up and hold it above her head. "When he shows up, you hold him down and I'll bash his head in with this!" she told Ikusaba.

"... ohhh-kay," Ikusaba said, and ambled over to the cubbyhole.

They stood there for quite a while, waiting for it to open.

"What's taking so long?" Sayaka asked, her good arm trembling under the weight of the drawer.

"I dunno," Ikusaba replied.

"Maybe there's some sort of a hold-up," suggested Monobear, who was standing between them, watching the cubbyhole with apparent interest.

Blessed silence reigned for a few moments after the declaration made by the small two-toned bear.

Then it broke.

"EYAAAAAAAAAHHH!" Sayaka shrieked as she turned to look at him, the drawer trembling in her hands.

Ikusaba's own hands streaked out to hold it in place. "Don't!" the other girl snapped. "That's what got me into this mess!"

"But - but - but -" Sayaka stammered.

"Sorry to interrupt," Monobear interjected, manifestly not sorry. "I just came out here to clarify a few things. But you should really thank Junko-chan for stopping you, because - hm! Actually, you know what? Since you're no longer students at Despair Academy, it's not technically against the rules for you to attack the headmaster of Despair Academy! So you'd have gotten a free pass if you did that, _this time_. Ah well. Can't be helped." The bear produced a phoney-looking flower from somewhere and sniffed it with an obviously affected air of melancholy.

"S-she told me who she really is," Sayaka stammered.

"How interesting. Anyway, on to clarification. I really only just stepped in because the suspense was becoming -"

"Unbearable?" Ikusaba interjected.

The bear was silent. "Ahem. I was going to say something else. Anyway. Clarification - people who are executed following a school trial will not return from the dead. Their injuries are too great to be repaired. So, no need to fret about any reunions with the person who killed you. Boy, that would be really -"

"Em-bear-assing?"

"I. Was. Going. To. Say. Something. Else."

"Oh," Sayaka said, losing her grip on the drawer, and dropping it into Ikusaba's hands, while almost collapsing in on herself. "Oh, that's so good to hear. Thank you, I - thank you," she said to Monobear.

"Aw, no need to thank me," he replied dismissively. "What am I saying? You can thank me all you want! But no, thank me by becoming productive members of the workforce!"

Silence reigned again.

"Sorry, what was that?" Ikusaba asked.

"Well, gee, Junko-chan, you little delinquent, the two of you have dropped out of school, after all, so you wouldn't expect your parents to go on supporting you after you've shamed them like that, assuming that they're alive which you probably shouldn't? Nope, time to get a job, yessir. And happily, there's one lined up for both of you! Be sure and do good at it! Otherwise you'll end up fired and you know what they say - if you don't work, you don't eat!"

"What - what - what - what are you talking about?" Sayaka finally cried.

"You'll see," the bear said cheerfully. "Oh, and incidentally - attacking your employer is a good way to get fired. You could call that a new rule if you like. Well, I'll give you two time to settle into your new rooms before we get down to work. Aren't I just the best boss ever? Later!" And with that, the bear dashed through the door and vanished from sight.

After a few seconds of paralyzed confusion, Sayaka dashed after the bear, leaving Ikusaba holding the drawer. Because of her injuries and because of the need to put the drawer back into its place, the other girl was a bit slower to follow ... though of course, she was also in no particular hurry because she knew quite well that Sayaka wasn't going to catch him.

Indeed, as she finally exited the autopsy room, she met Sayaka coming back the other way with a frustrated and confused look on her face. "Where did he go?!" the idol demanded.

"I dunno," Ikusaba lied, deliberately not glancing at the air ducts in the walls of the hallway. They were out of reach and - like most real air ducts - far too small for a human being to crawl around in, but neither would be a problem for a small bear-shaped robot.

"What did he mean by 'productive member of the workforce'?" Sayaka demanded.

"I dunno," Ikusaba lied again, then mixed things up by throwing in some red herring. "Maybe we're gonna be janitors?"

"How the hell can we be janitors?" Sayaka whined.

"We're three for three on 'I dunno'," Ikusaba informed her cheerfully. "My turn. Why do you keep asking me questions you know I won't be able to answer?"

Tempting though it was for Sayaka to sneer out 'I dunno' in response, she ground her teeth and instead replied, "Forgive me, dear lady, for thinking that someone, who used to work for the bastard behind all of this, might possibly have greater insight into what is going on here than I myself. Please, please forgive me."

Ikusaba coughed. "Okay, first of all, don't ever do that 'forgive me' thing again. It _really_ reminds me of one of my sister's more annoying friends. Well, that's not fair. My sister doesn't have any friends who aren't annoying, so it doesn't really particularize it enough. But you already remind me a lot of her, and I don't really need that right now. Secondly, like I told you, I was only working for the mastermind because I was worried about my sister. I don't know where my sister is right now," she continued, telling the absolute truth, before she started lying again. "So I'm not working for the mastermind right now, either. And even if I was, I wouldn't know anything about anything that's going to happen."

Slight hesitation, then she volunteered some information. "But I think I maybe did notice something you haven't."

"What?" Sayaka asked rudely.

"Well, while you were jilling yourself off over what happened to Leon -"

"I was not!" Sayaka protested reflexively. "I don't even know what that means!"

"It means masturbation, possibly not literally. Anyway," Ikusaba continued, to forestall Sayaka's renewed protest, "while you were enjoying yourself at his expense, I was looking around, and I saw something. Actually, it's more like I didn't see something. So I guess actually it's more like I didn't notice something that you ... also didn't, but understood -"

"What did you -" Sayaka started to ask, paused, shook her head, cleared her throat, then continued, sweetly. "And what was it?"

"A kitchen. There isn't one. No convenient kitchen. No mysteriously replenished food supplies. Nothing like that."

Sayaka considered. "Those who don't work ..." she said.

"... don't eat," Ikusaba finished, nodding.

"If we don't do what he says, he'll just let us ... starve to death."

"And while you could lose a few pounds -"

"HEY!"

"- it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. I'm just saying."

* * *

><p>On that note, they parted company, silently walking into the rooms with their respective images.<p>

Sayaka couldn't be completely sure, but she thought that the room that she was assigned was quite a bit smaller than the one she'd been living in up in the school. The bed was certainly smaller, really not much more than a cot. And the en suite looked ... but even looking at the door to the washroom made her go panicky again, so she decided to delay investigating its size until later.

She had the feeling that there was going to be an awful lot of later.

To distract herself from that, and from the gnawing in her stomach provoked by all that talk about food and her supposed need to lose a few pounds - lies, all of it, lies, lies, lies - she wandered over to the small closet and swung its doors open. Then slid them closed again, when she realized that it contained several exact copies of the outfit she'd been wearing on the first day, just like the closet back in the other room had. The mastermind had a very strange sense of humor, if he thought it was funny to put them all in the exact same clothes, day in and day out, even after they'd 'died'. She slid the door open again, to confirm that the closet contained a small set of dresser drawers, presumably themselves containing underwear and socks, then slid it shut again because she had no wish to see whether they were identical to the ones she'd been wearing when she came in.

Then she slid it open again, then slid it shut again, because why not? She didn't have anything better to do, so why not keep doing it? So she slid it open again, then slid it shut again, because it was starting to become fun. So she slid it open again, then slid it shut again, and the appeal was honestly wearing a little thin at this point. So she slid it open again, then slid it shut again, because it was still sort of fun, really, even if the thrill was clearly gone, and really it was just work work work at this point.

Then one more time, for luck, because if anyone could use some luck, it was certainly her at this point.

After a while, she found herself wishing that she had a watch. She wondered how long, exactly, she'd been standing there sliding the closet door open and shut. Had it been a long time? Or a short one. A glance at the bed confirmed that it had no bedside table, much less a clock. There hadn't been any clocks up there, either, she thought. At least not ones that worked. And none of them had had watches, and the weird little tablets that Monobear had handed out hadn't had a time display on them.

And no sun, so really, the only way that they'd had of measuring the passage of time had been those announcements Monobear had made about how it was time to go to bed or time to wake up, and who knew if he'd been telling the truth about what time it was. Had they really been in there for four days? What if these people pumped in the same sort of sleeping gas that had gotten them all on the first day while they were already in bed, so that there were actually longer intervals between days? What if the time between 'go to bed' and 'wake up' kept getting shorter, so as to create a much shorter day?

Why was she thinking about all this stuff?

Oh. That's right. To stop herself from thinking about all the other stuff. Yeah, she didn't want to think about any of that. She didn't really want to think at all, right now. So she found herself ambling over to the bed and flopping down face first on to it. It stank of dust. That was safe to think about. How much everything had just been waiting for all of this, how they were all just pawns in a game someone was playing. Much safer territory. Not at all damaging to the ego.

Her destiny was getting farther and farther away from her with every moment she was down here.

Nothing was safe, was it?

The sound of bells ringing roused Sayaka from whatever fugue state she'd entered, and she turned her head as Monobear's voice piped through the room. "All righty, it's time to begin a day of productive work! All employees will please gather immediately in the employee lounge!"

"Immediately, huh?" Sayaka said to herself as she pushed up off the bed. That didn't leave her much time - really, no time at all - to change out of the gown she'd been wearing since she woke up. Doubtless she was going to get a lecture about showing up to work in inappropriate clothes. Oh well. Couldn't be helped, and all that.

She walked out into the hallway and promptly encountered Ikusaba waiting for her, fully dressed in her original outfit, complete with high-heeled boots and even that silly rabbit hair dec of hers. Well, not quite the original outfit - this one was unbuttoned enough to show off more cleavage.

"Didn't like the outfits provided?" the other girl asked with a raised eyebrow.

"Took a nap instead of getting changed," Sayaka lied. Well, she might not be lying. She could possibly have passed out.

Ikusaba shrugged in response as the two of them headed into the lounge. The television screen was already lit up when they arrived, with Monobear's head and shoulders prominently displayed. "Ah, good, good," the bear declared. "I was concerned that I might have to show up and drag one or the other of you out of bed or the shower. I'd be really annoyed if that happened, it could really get violent, and I'm sure we'd all prefer it if things didn't get that -"

"Grizzly?" Ikusaba supplied.

"I wasn't going to say thaaaaat!" the bear roared, waving its tiny arms above its head.

"Please, please, just stop taunting him," Sayaka said wearily, as she sat down on the couch in front of the TV. "And those puns aren't funny, no matter who does them."

Ikusaba shrugged.

"Moving onward," Monobear growled. "Are you ready to get to work?"

"Do we have an alternative that doesn't involve starving to death?" the model asked.

"Of course you do," Monobear promptly replied. "There's drowning yourselves, hanging yourselves with the bedsheets -"

"Or other forms of suicide?" Sayaka asked.

Monobear ignored her, clearly warming to the subject. "- slamming the door closed on your head, breaking the television and using its glass to cut your wrists ... oh so many different alternatives! Moving forward, though ... are you ready to get work? Or what?"

The two girls exchanged a glance. "What do you want us to do?" Ikusaba asked.

"Fuck," replied Monobear.

Silence descended. "Sorry?" Ikusaba said.

"Apology accepted, just don't steal my lines again."

"... no, I wasn't ... that was ... why did you just say 'fuck'?" Ikusaba continued. "Were you upset about us not choosing to -"

"No, I was answering your question. That's what you do in your new job, as Adult Video performers. You fuck." A beat. "Okay, that was clearly unclear, again. I _could_ have been calling you a mean name, then, but I wasn't, I was stating what your job activity will be."

"Adult Video performers?" Sayaka gasped.

"Sometimes abbreviated as AV, but I don't see any reason to do that right now," Monobear agreed. "Now that we've got that straightened out -"

"Nothing is straightened out!" Sayaka shouted, getting up from the couch. "What do you mean, you want us to be AV performers? What ... you ... who _are_ you?"

Monobear's hands came up to cover its mouth. "Eh?" the bear gasped. "What-what-whatever do you mean? What was giving you the impression that I was someone other than Monobear, Headmaster of Despair Academy and now your post-drop-out employer?"

"You gave me that impression!" she said, pointing at him. "You did! Before, when we were in school, you were freaking out at the idea of there being any sort of, of, of _that_ going on between any of us, but now you're wanting us to make pornography? That's completely -"

"Ohhhhhh," Monobear interjected, sighing in relief. "That. Well. That's easily explained! You see, there's this thing that they call persona. Have you ever heard about persona? There's a whole line of video games that are all about it, they're kind of ridiculous, honestly, but because of them the concept has become well-known in you bastards' age group. See, while I'm acting as the Headmaster of Despair Academy, it's important for me to set a good moral example for you bastards, so I adopt a prudish persona. But since you've dropped out, it's not as important, so I adopt a different persona to deal with you, and don't have to be so prudish. I can be way more concerned with practicality and money, like this!"

"That's - wait, money?" Sayaka asked.

"Of course money! Makes the world go 'round, you know! This whole situation is being recorded, you see, and I'm going to sell edited excerpts to jaded hedonists across the world! It'll make a bundle! It better, that's how I'm financing the whole deal!"

Sayaka found herself speechless.

"What?" Monobear said at last. "It's not like any of you bastards are paying tuition! Look, just get on with the getting it on, already!"

"Could we have some privacy?" Ikusaba finally asked, having been silent all the way through this discussion.

"Absolutely not, that would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise!"

"... could we have the illusion of privacy?" she asked.

"Oh, well, if that's what you want -" The screen went blank.

"Are you a virgin?" Ikusaba asked bluntly.

"... what?" Sayaka squeaked.

"So that's a no?"

"Of course that's not a no!" she shouted. "What in the world are you -"

"Well, it's just that you're an idol, you know, and I assumed that someone, an agent, a manager, a director, a photographer, someone like that, would have taken care of it by this point, while you all the while presented an appearance of maidenly innocence to the public who demand that sort of thing of their idols, all the while hoping that each of them would be the one to deflower them, hypocritical jerks that they are."

After Sayaka took a moment to absorb that, she shook her head frantically. "No!" she lied. "Nothing like that has ever happened. Maybe that sort of thing happens when you're a model, but I -"

"I wouldn't know what happens when you're a model," Ikusaba interjected. "That was my sister's gig, not mine."

"What was your 'gig', then?" Sayaka asked angrily.

"Some other time, maybe I'll tell you. Right now, all you need to know is ... yeah, that stopped being an issue a while ago. And if this is the only way we're going to get any food, then -" The other girl shrugged. "I'm getting kinda hungry, you know?"

She considered claiming otherwise, but was interrupted by a stabbing pain in her stomach which gave her the lie.

"You too, huh?"

"... fine," Sayaka sighed, then raised her voice. "All right, we'll do it," she announced. "Send in the guys."

"... what guys?" Ikusaba asked, eyebrow raised.

"What do you mean, what guys, if we're going to do porn, then we need to have ... guys ... ohhhh." An alternative possibility abruptly suggested itself in her mind as Ikusaba began to unbutton her shirt the rest of the way.

"Wait," she said, staring in disbelief as Ikusaba's bra came into view. "Wait-wait-wait. Are you suggesting that he, he wants us to ... with each other?" As is to emphasize this, Sayaka pointed from herself to the other girl with her uninjured hand. "How's that even supposed to work?"

Finishing unbuttoning her shirt, the other girl looked at her archly, and said, in a mock-seductive tone, "My dear, let me _show_ you!"

"Gah!" Sayaka said, backing away from the couch until she hit one of the room's other chairs and flopping down into it.

"... I bet my line makes it into the final cut and yours doesn't," Ikusaba said a bit more normally.

"Who cares about the final cut?"

"I do! I do!" Monobear's voice issued from everywhere and nowhere.

"Illusion of privacy, remember?" Ikusaba said to the ceiling.

"I-I-I, ayiiiiiee ..." Sayaka continued, since even this brief digression wasn't enough to settle her nerves. Shaking her head, at least, gave her enough pause to collect her thoughts. "I can't do this, I don't - I've never -"

"Oh come on."

"Why are you saying that in such a skeptical and sarcastic tone?" she asked irritably, rather than whining, because she was definitely not a whiner.

"Look, I know about you and your group, okay? I don't really care for your kind of music - I prefer death metal and punk if you really want to know -"

"I don't."

Ikusaba ignored her. "- and the occasional Sousa march, but - anyway, my point is, I'm familiar with your band's oeuvre whether I want to be or not. And your stage shows always have lots of girl-on-girl flirtation, and half your songs are about the power of love between girlfriends -"

"Chaste, pure, sisterly love, not, not dykey stuff! And that other thing, that's just acting, and -"

Ikusaba stood up. "So _act_," she said a bit forcefully, pulling her shirt the rest of the way off, leaving her just clad in her bra, skirt, and boots. "Play to the camera, like I've been doing. Act like your life depends on it, _because it does_."

Sayaka stared up at her. Ikusaba stared right back. The other girl's stare was far more intense, and so Sayaka looked away first. "You've been with girls?" she asked uncomfortably.

"On occasion, yes, there've been multiple girls, in addition to the one-on-one stuff that I prefer. If what you're asking is whether I know what I'm doing, then the answer is I guess implicit in that."

"... then, I guess, you actually are going to have to, uh, show me, because I don't, and anyway, my arm - I wouldn't - who the hell wants to watch injured girls doing stuff with each other, anyway?" she added unhappily, though still not whining.

"Jaded hedonists. Weren't you paying attention earlier?" said Monobear's voice.

"Illusion of privacy!" the two of them yelled at the ceiling.

"Cheeeeee."

"Fine," said Sayaka, sitting back in the chair. "Just ... just get on with it, then."

"Oh, you sweet little flirt," Ikusaba replied in the mock-seductive tone as she walked over to her. Before Sayaka could even start to react to that, the other girl bent over and began kissing her, simply pressing her lips against Sayaka's own at first, then pushing into her mouth with her tongue as their bodies began to draw closer to each other.

It was odd, being kissed by a girl like this. It wasn't as though she'd had many kisses in general, certainly no sloppy kisses by her manager in the privacy of his office back before she'd turned twelve, so she didn't have much basis for comparison. But on the whole, she thought Ikusaba was a pretty good kisser, if maybe a bit too forceful for her liking, particularly the way that the other girl's hands were on her hips -

Wait. What were the other girl's hands doing on her hips?

Oh. They were pushing up the hem of Sayaka's gown. Ohhh. Uh ... this was moving faster than she was really comfortable with, actually, she was really just still getting used to the whole idea of it, and now all of a sudden -

"Mmm," Ikusaba said, as she pulled back from the kiss and glanced down at the suddenly exposed region of Sayaka's crotch. "Shimapan. Naughty naughty."

_Naughty naughty?_ Sayaka thought, too incredulous to repeat the words out loud. She hadn't chosen these panties, so how could anyone call her that for wearing them when she hadn't even seen them herself and -

Abruptly, her thoughts were thrown into disarray by the sensation of being touched down there through the panties; not just touched, but rubbed rather forcefully, as a matter of fact, with the heel of one of the other girl's hands, while the other basically tickled her waist. As one does, she gasped.

"Oh, you like that, huh?" Ikusaba asked, not sounding at all like any managers who had never ever gotten Sayaka alone in their offices and then not done anything at all to her, in Sayaka's utterly honest opinion. "Yeah, you liiiike that. Let's see whether you like something else."

"Whah elll-" Sayaka asked, finding the mental space to be annoyed at the fact that her voice was so distorted by the sensation.

"This else," Ikusaba replied as she reached up with her thumbs to yank the hips of the panties away from Sayaka's own hips, pulling them taut and then slicing them with the surprisingly sharp red thumbnails. The remaining fabric came off quite easily, and Ikusaba cooed. "Ah, what a pretty pretty flower."

Sayaka didn't get that. After all, it wasn't as though she'd spent hours examining herself in a mirror, but she certainly didn't see any resemblance to any flowers worthy of the name. And even if it was, who the heck kissed flowers, like Ikusaba was about to doooooooghhhh.

After a few minutes of, of whatever it was that Ikusaba was doing to her, since Sayaka found it impossible to look down and actually watch for fear that the sight, when added to the sensations and the sounds that she couldn't ignore, was going to drive her coocoo bananas, she felt the sensations stop, and then a feather-light touch on her waist.

"There," the other girl said softly. "That should be enough for the first installment."

"F-f-f-first installment?" Sayaka stammered out, finally looking down then promptly looking back up again when she saw what her secret garden looked like at the moment.

"Uh, yeah?" Ikusaba replied sardonically. "We're going to be doing this every day from now on, remember. Well, maybe not this. I'll probably show you how tribadism works tomorrow, and the next day -"

Sayaka throttled her immediate response, which was of course to demand an explanation of a certain unfamiliar term, and interjected, "Okay, yes, I get it. Um ... you, uh, don't, um, want me to do that, what you did just now, I mean, you don't want me to do that to -"

"Nope," Ikusaba replied flatly. "You'd suck at it."

"... oh."

"Really, bad sex is not better than no sex at all. Maybe once I've shown you how it goes, you might be worth something, but I can cheerfully go without your fumbling attempts at pleasuring me."

"... you could have just left it at 'you'd suck at it', you know," Sayaka bit out unhappily.

"Oh, sorry," Ikusaba said, so perfunctorily it almost made Sayaka's head spin again. "It's just that you sounded like you were kind of oddly keen about -"

"Well, I'm not!" Sayaka snapped closing her legs and doing her level best to ignore the wetness under her.

"Wha'ever."

"Actually, I could still use a bit more footage," Monobear's voice piped in. "But you know, I guess that a masturbation scene with just Junko-chan would be good enough!"

Relieved, profoundly relieved, after the moment of fear, for it had definitely been fear, that she'd felt after Monobear's initial words, Sayaka quickly got up. She didn't even pause to address the weird way that the robot or whatever kept on calling Ikusaba by her cover identity. Nor did she pause to see Ikusaba settle down in the same chair where she'd been sitting, hike up her short skirt to reveal that she was wearing nothing underneath, lick a finger, and then reach down between her own legs. No, she kept her eyes right on the doorway out, never pausing at all.

"You'll find the food you earned in your room, by the way," Monobear's voice added.

And indeed she did, on a tray on the floor in front of the bed, a hamburger and fries wrapped in familiar packaging.

"I'm loving it," Sayaka muttered to herself as she looked at the food ... then ran for the bathroom, barely making it before she threw up whatever was in her stomach.

She'd never been bulimic. (Or anorexic. She worried about her weight, of course, but skeletal girls did not get to appear on stage.) So losing it like this was a novel experience, and Sayaka was coming to the conclusion that novel experiences were to be avoided. Not that it seemed that she was going to have much of a choice in the matter, if Ikusaba's words on the subject were to be believed.

Once her stomach was reasonably settled, she awkwardly got up off the bathroom floor, flushed the toilet, and lurched out into the bedroom. Even looking at the food threatened to bring back the nausea, so she just avoided it for now. It wasn't like the stuff could go bad, given how many preservatives it had in it. Instead, she carefully lay down and spent a while just staring at the ceiling.

Boring experiences weren't really any better than novel ones, she ultimately decided.

There was a knock at the door.

"Gosh," she said, to whomever might be listening. "I wonder who it could possibly be." Awkwardly, she got up again and lurched over to the door.

"'Sup?" asked Ikusaba, mouth half-full of hamburger.

"Ghgll," Sayaka replied, hand coming up to her mouth.

The other girl swallowed before continuing. "Oh, no, don't tell me you're bulimic."

"I'm _not_ bulimic," she growled. "But I did ... look, what do you want?"

"I just came to see if you were all right," Ikusaba answered, taking another bite. "I mean, there's just you and me down here, so we've got to look out for each other, right?"

Sayaka kept herself from rolling her eyes at the cloying sentiment. "Right. Well, I'm not all right, but I guess that I'm as close to all right as I'm going to get until we get out of here."

"Until? Don't you mean if?"

"No, I mean until." What she did not perhaps mean was 'we'.

"Well, I guess that's a good attitude," Ikusaba mused. "How's the arm?"

"Aches a little, but ... I've never had a broken arm, so I don't know how it's supposed to feel," she admitted. "Never even had a sprained ankle before this." That had been what happened to other girls, strictly by coincidence.

"Well, I've never been as cut up as I was, either, but most of the wounds aren't aching much anymore," Ikusaba explained. "I think whatever they did to us is still working, so we might be healing quickly. You can probably have the cast off in a day or so."

"... how are we going to get it off?" Sayaka asked.

"... that's a very good question."

"Greeaaaat."

"Well, look at the bright side. We'll probably only have to do a bit more girl-girl stuff, since there's bound to be a guy getting sent down shortly."

Sayaka stared blankly. "That's the bright side? You think one of our classmates is going to get murdered, and that's the bright side?"

Ikusaba shrugged. "Well, it could be one of the cute ones. Naegi-kun, maybe?"

"You're weird," Sayaka declared. "Good night." And she shut the door.

**To Be Continued**


End file.
